Honoring Mothers with a Trauma-Sensitive Lens
Part III of a series exploring motherhood and how religious teachings have torn at the fabric of healthy mother/daughter relationships.
You can access Part I here: Let's Be Honest: Exploring Mother/Daughter Relationships
You can access Part II here: The Harm Caused by Honor Culture
What does honoring our mothers actually mean?
What would honor look like in your story?
How has trauma impacted your story?
I have researched the word honor over the years and appreciate the following words by Chaim Bentorah: (The entire article is worth reading.)
The word honor in Hebrew is surprising, it is the word kavod which is the word for glory. It means to be weighty. In one respect that is bearing a burden of a weighty issue. In other words, honoring our parents go beyond childhood, it takes us into their old age where we bear their burdens when they become too infirmed to carry their burdens.
When not much was emotionally available to me that felt like the kind of honor the church expected, this is exactly how I honored my mother—I cared for her into old age. This isn’t possible for everyone—some relationships are simply too toxic. Knowing what I know now I would have set better boundaries and been less inclined to remain in the room when dysregulated. It would have been necessary to understand what that meant!
My lack of understanding meant that I set honoring my mother above myself and never stepped into a therapist’s office to heal the childhood wounds of abuse. That would have required that I be honest and willing to unbury the pain. Since the honor culture in the church and my family provided no space to be honest about my mother, that never happened.
Understanding how trauma impacted me has enabled me to recognize the difference between who I was born to be and who I became to survive. It also allowed me to see a similar impact on my mother. My respect involves holding the truth about our story in hands that also offer grace.
Holding truth with grace is much different than showing honor by remaining silent or bypassing the pain with forgiveness and only saying nice things. If I were to write the description for CASA now (see Part II)—after ten years of healing—it would look very different. It would say that I understand my mother was an intelligent and remarkably tenacious woman who lived with the impact of childhood trauma every day. Without healing the impact of her trauma was spewed on me from my earliest days on earth and only escalated after I was sexually abused at the age of three.
Indeed, I never knew the unconditional love and protection of a mother. Healing wasn’t a matter of recovering—it required starting from scratch and re-mothering myself.
Did I need her to do better? Absolutely! Do I believe she could have done better? Not really. So much would have needed to be different for her—including the availability of trauma-informed therapy and the support to access it.
I show my mother grace by acknowledging the challenges she faced:
She was an adult with a history of traumatic events that we will never fully know.
She was the daughter of a mother who bore thirteen children (my mother was not quite in the middle). Her mother was sickly and passed when my mother was around twenty. She mentioned her father’s lack of connection and concern for her needs as a great source of misery during her childhood.
She was overwhelmed by the arrival of her third child (me) and left me in the nursery for the first five days of my life so she could rest. As a pastor’s wife, it was important for her children to set the example of what a Christian family looked like.
She had no relatives who could have lent support that lived any closer than several states away. She struggled to have friendships within the context of ministry.
She was very dependent on my father, who was the busy pastor of a brand-new growing church. He did his best to help care for all of us—but the church came first. I believe his love for my mother blinded him to what was happening in the home when he was absent.
She suffered from various forms of mental illness (likely trauma-based) her entire life and the cultural/church stigma surrounding mental health kept her from accessing psychological help—though her doctors did prescribe "nerve pills.”
Honor or respect that stops unhealthy generational patterns requires
carrying the weight of the truth bathed in trauma-informed grace.
In the past six years since publishing my story in BRAVE, I have had the privilege of watching both daughters and mothers be transformed by the understanding of trauma. I have had students take the information home to parents and grow closer as they began to be honest with each other and understand the other’s stories. I have never seen anything provide a path to healing relationships as well as this has.
Tomorrow, on Mother’s Day, I will conclude this series by explaining how the story my mother and I shared now enables me to encourage others on their healing journeys. God never intended for my mother and me to never know one another, but it is what happened and I am determined to create purpose out of the ashes!